THE SUDDEN RETURN BY BOB EJIKE

THE SUDDEN RETURN

BY BOB EJIKE

 The disclosure stung me like a deadly mamba, spreading its villainous poison immeasurably into my veins, through my body, up to my head, my palate tart as quinine, my feelings fluctuating from impotent resentment to pure unadulterated hatred. I hated her for the heinous betrayal and her impetus in lasciviously divulging the details, even though I had demanded for them. It irked me profoundly that my years of dutiful support had counted very little to her in taking that vital decision of her life and that she had chosen someone else despite my costly sacrifice. My first impulse was to strangle her, pack her body in the boot of my car and drive behind the hotel and dump it in Lake Victoria.

It was a stormy flight in the bowel of the huge Boeing, but the food and wine were excellent. My mind occasionally stole back to Divine, though not with any anxiety, bitterness or expectancy. I just couldn’t help wondering how she was, how she was getting by and if she was happy and felt accomplished in her life. I asked myself why she had orchestrated such an intricate and elongated charade with the full intent of ending it in heartbreak and possibly reprisal. If she cared nothing for me, did she not care for herself? She knew more than me about romantic vendetta, because the dailies were replete with such haunting tales. Everyday people got killed, maimed or deformed by their jilted lovers. Romantic breakup was one of the highest reasons for violent crime. Did she not know that I was capable of wreaking vengeance on her and rendering her like those dismembered former partners of discarded lovers we saw in the newspapers? Or in her mad greedy or needy bid for unscrupulous extortion she had forgotten even to protect herself, for her to have chucked me out after being lavishly trained with my money suggested that she felt that she had achieved her purpose with me and did not need me anymore. But that belief of hers was a product of childish enthusiasm.

A child cannot not see from the top of a tree what an old woman sees sitting on the ground. What I was certain about, which she was ignorant of, was that it was in this her post-college period that she needed me the most, at least financially, because when a student who has old struggling parents is in school the parents may manage to give her financial support, but when she leaves school the parents feel decidedly relieved and do not consider themselves under further obligation to continue maintaining her on their paltry pension. I went through more wine and dozed off.

 We landed and changed plane at the amazingly grandiose Amsterdam airport after a short delay.  The flight from Amsterdam to Milan was smooth. I slept, ate their miserly snacks and woke above the distant old brown blocks of flats and landscapes of Milan. The customs and immigration clearance at Malpenza Airport Milan were equally swift. So I stepped out of the arrivals and boarded an airport taxi. ’Arese,’ I called out and settled with my single hand luggage into the back seat. The driver moved the cabby out of the airport premises and I fell back into sleep. The taxi whisked me to my home in Arese, a beautiful and green exclusive Milan suburb that had started as a settlement for workers of the car maker Alfa Romeo, which was located close by.  The apartment was cold and lonely in a way that only total isolation from lack of use could make it. I slept all night, rested much of the following day and became consequently invigorated.

The day after my arrival at Milan was my hospital appointment day, so I set out at dawn, taking with me the folder containing my medical report from Kampala International Hospital. I immediately boarded the big, half-filled, air-conditioned bus and instantly felt the culture clash in the change of color, language, sartorial custom and general attitude of a people who worked much, lacked nothing and wanted very little to do with others.  Young people in designer jeans and leather or corduroy jackets with books and magazines in their hands, tiny earphones in their ears and sophisticated cellular phones in their pockets, pampered women in the latest international fashion, who kept gainful jobs, went to the gym, jogged daily and could afford most of their needs, and Men in exquisite suits who preferred their holidays at the sea or mountains to marrying a harem of wives, or keeping a few wives and maintaining a harem of mistresses and making a battalion of children, then struggling through a life of near-starvation to support them and their mothers and eventually dying of high blood pressure at the first instance of aging. Some of my former neighbors and acquaintances recognized me and waved, the lady sitting beside me whom I vaguely remembered, picked up a conversation, wanting to know if there were lions in the streets of Kampala and if I lived on a tree, lamenting her inability to save enough money for safari in Africa and how she had always wanted to see Malindi and Nairobi.

 I stopped off at the center of Milan and traversed the city by the underground train to get to the hospital. San Rafaele was one of the biggest and most modern hospitals in the world. If not for the elevated statue of the Madonna at the center of the wide compound of well-tended gardens, flowing fountains with sculpted religious personages and rare flowers, it could have passed for a massive five star hotel. But rather the stunning million-Euro high-rise building was a hi-tech infirmary with several floors underground, established by a catholic priest, Don Luigi Verse.

Once inside the grand, packed but airy reception hall, following directions from uniformed officials, I took a number from the numbering machine and sat down in one of the shiny steel benches. Wide television-like screens and syncopated female voices from invisible loudspeakers called out numbers and directed patients to the many glass-covered counters that surrounded the benches. My number was eventually announced and I walked to the indicated counter. The lady behind the counter checked my documents and health insurance papers and then made me pay paid 80 Euros for the express appointment. She stamped my papers swift-handedly and directed me to Dr. Ferrari, Cardiology, two floors underground. I got into the lift and eventually asked my way to the doctor’s clinic. The solemn, tall, slim, blonde, elderly, freckled, eminent consultant cardiologist sat powerfully in the well-equipped and highly modernized studio. He ushered me into a chair opposite him and took my folder. He read it with his head screwed up in professional concentration, then he glanced up to me and inquired in Italian. ‘Do you smoke?’

‘No, but I smoked heavily in my youth’ I reported.

‘You are still a youth’ he reminded me with a practiced clinical smile and I thought that was a matter of opinion.  He scribbled SMOKER on my report with his indecipherable doctor’s calligraphy.

‘Do you drink?’ He inquired.

‘Occasionally’ I admitted with a creeping sense of guilt.

DRINKER, he wrote, then he removed his glasses and beseeched. ‘Tell me what happened. What led to this collapsing episode?’ His speech was slowed by age. He was a consultant and must have retired from regular practice many years before, but had been retained on contract by the hospital because of his expertise.

I was at first discomfited but eventually took courage and summarized the story of my affair with Divine and the deathly aftermath of her eventual betrayal, as briefly as I could. The elderly physician nodded sympathetically throughout the narration. When I finished, he instructed. ‘Take off your shirt and lie down on the stretcher.’

 I obeyed him. He put his stethoscope over his ears and commenced examining my chest. Then he placed plastic plugs with wet ends in different parts of my body and proceeded with an electrocardiography examination. The machine drew quick cryptic graphs on the screen. When he finished, he printed out the incomprehensible result and gave me an ample tissue, the largest I had ever seen, to clean up. I scrubbed off the white liquid in various parts of my body and threw the crumbled tissue into the aluminum waste paper container on the floor beside the stretcher.

‘You can dress up’ he instructed. I put on my shirt. ‘Sit down’ he motioned me back into my chair. I lowered myself into the seat. ‘You have had a spasm. It is a very small heart attack, luckily. It could have been worse.  I am not a psychotherapist but at my age and having been in this profession for a very long time, I have seen a lot. Desiring a person so much can become a huge problem for you. Loving vainly, infatuation, lust, becoming obsessive about someone will make you blind and you may not notice that the love is unrequited and the other person may take advantage of your feelings to abuse you sexually, brutalize you emotionally or exploit you materially. Often there are many signs to show you that a person you love is not in love with you. But when you are obsessively lustful about someone, it is hard to notice these glaring testaments. That is why you should love with one eye open, not blind.’ He paused and glared at me for a while, then continued, ‘There is no enjoyment whatsoever in caring for someone who doesn’t show care for you. It’s just an illusion, a project doomed to fail from the very beginning. It is a distraction from your goals and a waste of your time and resources. It is also not good for your self-image and your self-esteem. You will never have happiness and self-confidence when you are in a bond with someone who doesn’t cherish you, just blinking hopes and diminished dreams.  It isn’t worth it lying to yourself that there is love where you know there is none, pretending that it is working when you know that it isn’t. Take the trouble to find someone who sees your beauty and potentials and enjoys your achievements and inclinations no matter how humble. If you concentrate your attention on one person you would think that that person is the most beautiful being on earth. But if you look around you will discover that she might not even be worth your while. Infatuation can drain you emotionally and mentally, destroy your health, maim you and send you to an early grave. It isn’t fair to have a stroke or a heart attack because of someone who doesn’t care for you, who is enjoying her life with another person and may be laughing through your pains. It would have been fairer for you to find someone else who would appreciate you and accept you the way you are and I assure you that there are many better ones out there waiting, who will never give you the same problems you are in right now. Go out, socialize, talk to people, be in your best, join clubs, start new hobbies, sign up for social networks, generally flirt,  and you will be amazed what beauty lies out there. But most of all nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.’

‘Thank you, Doctor.’ I said when he finished, feeling thoroughly enlightened and deliriously grateful.

He wrote a report, put it in my folder and handed it to me. ‘Take this to Radiography, the floor below this.’

I left the doctor’s clinic and Cardiology and called and entered the lift after a long wait. It was thronged with patients and medical personnel, all looking funereal. The elevator stopped me at the lower floor seconds later and I stepped out and strolled to Radiography, where I was received by responsive white-uniformed nurses who led me into an inner chamber full of gigantic machines. A doctor in a white lab coat was sitting in a white armchair by a treadmill. I handed over my folder to him; he read it and afterwards made me remove my shirt, closed the folder and said, ‘Get on the treadmill.’ He administered an injection in my wrist as I mounted the exercise machine and started walking. He began reading the enigmatic graph that was running rapidly on the screen in front of us.

‘Do you feel pain in the chest?’ He asked me after a long and strenuous period.

‘Yes’ I admitted. I had been enduring it.

‘Stop’ he ordered. From the urgency in his voice I could tell that I was close to a repeat of the episode that had brought me all the way here. I stopped and stepped out of the keep fit mechanism. He punched a button and the machine vomited reams of paper with graphic designs. He collected the papers and filed them, then he told me, ‘sit down’ nodding to a seat by the corner of the room. Shortly afterwards, a nurse entered and motioned me to follow her to the next room. I obeyed and a series of electronic tests were carried out on me in which I was placed inside complex machinery that gave the creepy sensation of being inside a casket, with x-rays and lights of various bright colors running all over my body. Thereafter, I was sent back to Dr Ferrari with the x-ray negatives and the results. The cardiologist read the report, his face expressionless. ‘I am afraid we will have to admit you for further examinations’ he informed me. I nodded assent. He scribbled on the form and pointed upward as he handed me the file. ‘The ward is in the fourth floor.’

I found my way to the immaculately clean and airy ward. The nurses received me and immediately strapped my name on my left hand, and I understood from the solemnity of the ritual that it was for easy identification of my corpse in case I did not make it.

In the next two weeks I followed the hospital regimen. The cleaners came in the mornings, then the meals, of healthy diet, nurses taking blood samples for tests and doctors’ visits, ingestion of medicines and sleep. I realized that in the three years that I had been living in Uganda this was the first time I rested. I once had a driver that used to tell me….. ‘Sir, please rest. Even God rested’, and I would reply mischievously that I had the entire eternity to rest when I would be dead. I realized ominously how close to that I was.

After three days I was taken back to Radiography and made to pick a number from the numbering machine and sit in a circular reception with other patients, mostly old people. I was the youngest person there. A hidden microphone called names and the patients called disappeared into an inner chamber. A nurse soon came and told me to go into the toilet and empty my bowel. I did, energetically, sweating with the exertion of ejection. When I came out she gave me a big, white cup of thick pink liquid. ‘Drink it all.’ She commanded. I noticed that all the other patients had the same kind of cup filled with the same liquid. I drank gradually. It had the taste of sweetened chemicals with a flavor of vanilla. When it finished I started reading one of the gossip magazines in the centre of the table that related the private lives of Berlusconi and other Italian leaders and celebrities.

It eventually got to my turn and I was taken into an inner chamber full of complex, sophisticated medical machines. The largest equipment lay in the middle, the size of two cupboards. I was made to undress and lie down inside it. Then a nurse pressed a button on the wall and the top part of the machine started coming down over me with an alien eerie sound and lights of various colors flashing everywhere as if a spacecraft was taking off with me trapped inside it. I was soon encased within the machine as its reader moved gradually from my feet up to my head. It was like a James Bond high-tech situation. After what seemed an age, the cover started receding upwards, until it hung in its former position, liberating me.

‘Come out’ ordered the nurse.

I stepped out watching her face keenly for a hint of the result. There was none.

‘Dress up.’ she instructed me.

I put on my clothes.

‘Please do not go near children or pregnant women for two days. This examination is radioactive’ she informed me as if I could go anywhere outside my ward. The nurse that had brought me took me back to the ward.

Towards the end of my second week in hospital, a male nurse whom I had gotten a little familiar with visited me in the morning. ‘How are you today?’ He inquired.

‘Fine ‘I said.

‘Tomorrow you will undergo endoscopy. So no food from now until the operation is carried out’

‘What is endoscopy?’ I queried.

‘For easy understanding let’s call it the electronic alternative to an open surgery. I am afraid we will have to enter your heart through your artery with a needle, a microscopic camera that will take the photograph of your bloodstream and your heart, and minute repair equipment which will fix any damage to your blood vessel. It will go into your main artery with rings and wherever there is a blockade it will put a ring to keep the vessel open and the blood flowing, to prevent a repeat of the blood clot that caused your heart attack.’

I nodded permission but my heart was filled with dread. The unsettling image of an external object traveling up my blood stream into my heart terrified me. He sensed my trepidation and immediately added. ‘You have nothing to fear. The boys here are very good and they do this every day. We hardly have any casualties.’

If he had meant to console me he had done the exact opposite, because the mention of ‘casualties’   reminded me that the operation was a mortal risk and the word ‘hardly’ implied that there was the possibility of fatality resulting from the intervention, and that I could be a victim. He left as quietly as he had come.  I stayed without food all day but I did not feel groggy as I had no appetite and I was excreting whitish stuff in the toilet.

The next morning I was taken into the theater. It was a large room and everything in it was white including the walls, so it looked like a space research center with all the huge, complex machines blinking out lights from big screens. There were two nurses in attendance. A stretcher stood in the centre of the room. A nurse made me pull down my pajamas trousers and lie on the stretcher. She shaved the pubic hair   off my right thigh, then three doctors strolled in and one shoved a document into my hand and announced. ‘We are going to examine your heart. Sign here please.’

I scrawled my signature at the end of the document, permitting them to carry out the operation and indemnifying them against mortal eventuality.

The other medical officer was preparing an injection. ‘We shall give you local anesthesia. It isn’t painful,’ he revealed and injected me in the right lap.  Surprisingly it did not hurt as much as I had anticipated.  I was made to lie down on the stretcher. ‘Do not raise your back or move this leg or ….’ instructed the doctor who had injected me. I stiffened my leg and then relaxed it and considered it dead. The third doctor shifted the extension of one machine from the wall to my   stretcher and proceeded to make a hole in my lap and send in the tiny wired needle into my artery. The screen opposite came alive with the image of my heart, the inner parts of my chest and my innards. Some minutes later I anxiously watched the needle swimming up beside my stomach, towards my heart. It eventually arrived at the right side of the heart, carrying out the investigation it had been programmed to execute, then began its retreat.

‘The right side of your heart is alright’ the doctor who had given me the injection announced brightly, sounding relieved.

The needle gradually descended and exited and they reprogrammed and mandated it from the left axis, and it commenced its gradual ascent through my blood stream into the right part of my heart, performing its cryptic assignment. It eventually withdrew and left that part of my upper anatomy.

‘The second part of your heart is alright. Thank God’ declared the doctor, to my immense relief.

 ‘However, can you see those holes in your stomach?’ He pointed some little black dots on the screen. I wanted to nod but remembered that I was not allowed to move my head, so I emitted a muffled ‘yes.’

 ‘Those are ulcers and your blood pressure is high. Those can be treated gradually. As long as you take your drugs regularly, do some exercise and go on a diet, you will be alright. No fats, no red meat, no chocolates, you will be alright. You need to love yourself. Most people who come here do so because they don’t have enough love for themselves. Do not smoke, do not drink excessively, watch your weight, give yourself time for exercise. Walk fast for a minimum of one hour everyday and run for 5 minutes; you need to lose fifteen kilograms. Stop worrying about the problems of this world because your God who made the world will solve them for you.  Please do not raise your head or move that leg for the next twenty-four hours.’

‘Thank you doctor’ I managed to utter, thinking about the ephemeral nature of life.

The stretcher was eventually pushed to my ward. I remained in that position without food for the next twenty-four torturous hours.  I never knew that it could be such an unreservedly exhausting task just to stay in one position and this made me appreciate the luxury of physical freedom. Eventually, a fleshy, pink nurse brought my meal and told me that I was now free to move my limbs. I was discharged from the hospital the following day.

 I spent the next two weeks convalescing in my home in Arese, paying a backlog of house bills, rates and taxes, watching the countless television programs that I had missed out on, calling up old friends and going to their homes for dinners, taking my daily drugs, exercising, grateful to be alive, regaining my essence and generally taking things easy. By the time I returned to Kampala Divine had been completely erased from my mind. I had memorized Dr Ferrari’s sagely advice, repeating it severally in my head.  During the return flight to Kampala, when I was not reading Time magazine or watching a movie, it would flash back to my mind and by the time I sighted the equatorial forest, tiny isolated homesteads and the expansive lake that hugged Entebbe Airport, it had become a chant in my consciousness. I was determined to make a clean break from the past, follow my doctor’s advice and take that trouble to find that someone who would appreciate me as I was, with all my faults. I started erecting a defensive palisade within my heart to keep away Divine and no matter how the force of her thought pushed; I refused to insult my dignity by letting it in. When Peter my chauffeur dropped me home in the exclusive Muyenga reserve, my cat Orestina had killed and dismembered a small rat in the parlor. I cleared the repulsive trophy. There were several missed calls and text messages waiting for me in my cellular phone but two missives immediately caught my attention. They were from Divine, unashamedly soliciting for money to go and do her hair in the saloon. They got me wondering about the character of this girl whom I had loved and revered so much. Was she really the respectable person I had taken her for, deserving of all the esteem, affection and generosity that I had willfully lavished on her? How could any person with an iota of dignity dismiss a partner only to start soliciting for money from the scorned former lover for the beautification of her body which she felt the ex unworthy of enjoying? Were my friends correct after all in their claim that this girl I had idolized so much was from a stock with neither decorum nor honour? I just ignored the messages.

In the weeks that followed my return to the city fondly nicknamed K’la, my focus returned to my artistic project. My swashbuckling manager Carly had practically established my artistic preeminence and critical media acclaim in my absence. I was now, from that viewpoint, virtually at the same level of fame and relevance with some of the most popular artistes in the country. But Carly was unsatisfied with his own achievements. He was his own greatest competitor. He made no secret of the fact that he wanted to establish me as the topmost musician in the nation, commanding premium artiste fees. But he did not intend to stop there. After that he aimed at making me the biggest star in the continent. Indeed an ambitious project. He required me just to back up his covert promotional efforts with loud appearances in specified discotheques and nightclubs, and to grace some popular TV programs. ‘The story of the romance between you and superstar Fina got everyone talking about you and you should know that I engineered it and got my friends in the press to write about it. You are booked for Unplugged at Silk   Nightclub, live performances at Governors, Rouge, Club Swear, Steak Out, Capital Pub, Rock Garden, Wood Garden, Fat Boys, Volts and Congo Vision. General is doing his album launch at his nightclub. You will be playing there. There’s an appointment for Stracker’s show at WBS, Sophia and Eddy Khan at UBC, Ken Love on UBC, Faisal at NBS, Tough Boy on NBS, Douglas at Record TV, and the biggest show on East African television, NTV Rendezvous, and interview appointments on Sanyo, Super, Beat, Capital, Zimba, Dembe FM and CBS, and innumerable radio talk shows’ Carly announced, his eyes glittering triumphantly.

My mind involuntarily sneaked back to the theatre in San Rafaele Hospital Milan. In my unsteadying peripheral vision, the eerie needle whirled in my artery, swimming up my bloodstream, heading with investigative zest towards my heart.  ‘Carly, please don’t think that I do not appreciate your good work, good intention and enthusiasm, but I am sorry to have to disappoint you. I can’t do all those shows right now. I was just discharged from hospital after an electronic heart intervention.’

Carly steeled in silent disillusionment. ‘At least some’ he uttered appealingly.

‘Sure, some’ I agreed, not out of any need for career advancement but to please the man who had slaved catatonically for weeks to make those groundbreaking arrangements.  My phone buzzed with my music ringtone. It was a text message from Divine.  It read: Won’t you send me the money I requested from you, it’s a pittance?

The same girl who enjoyed the fruit of my enterprise, ungratefully dumped me and almost sent me to the hereafter had now reduced herself from enjoying the surplus on the table to begging for the crumbs that fell out of it. But I was determined to see that even the crumbs did not fall into undeserving hands. My face contorted with anger as I typed: It is written. Forsake the devil and all his works. If you are proud enough to reject a man for whatever reason you should also be proud enough to reject his money.

‘What does she still want?’ Carly asked tetchily, having guessed who I was communicating with.

‘Money, what else?’ I announced exasperatedly.

He looked embarrassed. ‘She has no conscience, no honor and no dignity.  She almost killed you. It is a miracle that you are still alive today. Has she come to see you? To know how you are, if you are alive, how you survived, how your business and career are going, where you’ve been all this time? Did she even notice that you traveled, that you were hospitalized because of her denial and had your heart invaded by an external object that could have killed you? That you are now on life support drugs, all because of her, and can no longer work as hard as you used to, all because of her cruel heart? Does she care? She doesn’t want you; all she wants is your money. Sir, you have to be extremely careful. These girls have their talents and their means and they can resort to very unexpected and extreme measures if a man becomes obstinate and they fail to get him with their beauty. They can go diabolic and even use dark Juju forces to penetrate a man’s heart, control him, take away all he has and leave him penniless, stranded and vagabonding in the streets. Sir, this is your chance, while the link between both of you remains cut, stay away from her. Don’t give her a chance for a comeback, don’t even reply her messages, do everything in your power to keep your distance from that unprincipled and heartless gold-digger.’

While assimilating Carly’s counsel, I found myself remembering that In spite of Divine’s beauty and academic brilliance, I had never met anybody who regarded it as a good thing for me to have related intimately with her and taken our affair seriously. Everybody responded to the relationship with sad hilarity. Even before she showed her true color, they had all seen her as a mere opportunist. Without uttering a word their covert glances always betrayed their pity for me in spite of Divine’s natural allure. Those who spoke up had advised me to give her up; but I would not have any of that. The fears of my associates now seemed to have been corroborated by Divine’s callous actions.

I soon received a cell phone communication from Divine. I do not remember her exact words now but the message read like: I am really sorry darling; I know that I wronged you. Please forgive me. It was my elder sister. She forbade me from seeing you, saying that you are too old for me. If you would kindly give me audience, I will explain to you all that happened, but most of all I am full of regret because I have come to realize that you are the best thing that ever happened to me. I am a big girl now and it is you I want to spend the rest of my life with.

I deleted the text and tried not to think about it, but my mind kept going back to her words. I fought back the suffocating urge to know what had really gone wrong with all my willpower. At the end my curiosity outweighed my reticence and I began to feel that I had the right to know what had really happened to my affair with Divine. If it was true that external forces had infiltrated her, influenced her juvenile mind and coerced her into breaking up our affair, then it was only fair that I gave her a hearing, after all a nineteen year old girl was anything but mature and an older sister could be such a potent force within the family and a strong influence on a teenage girl.  But was that sufficient to stop her from seeing me even surreptitiously, from making some furtive phone calls and sending occasional secret text messages? Most unlikely. These complexities begged a deluge of questions whose answers seemed so remote. The more I mulled over the matter the more my inquisitiveness grew and grew, until it reached that point of irrationality at the precipice of lunacy, and without really meaning to, I called Divine’s number. When she answered I said. ‘Wav’s End, 4pm tomorrow,’ and hung up.

I almost did not recognize Divine when the security man ushered her into the room in Wav’s End, the same little room where we had once spent a week, so tiny that it enhanced physical intimacy. I had chosen its privacy not for the purpose of seduction but because I knew that our tête-à-tête would be both spiky and confidential. Not the kind of conversation done sitting in an open bar with strangers listening in. Divine was now without doubt a fully grown woman. Her hair hung back in long, intricate braids over her beautiful pink dress that displayed her heightened curves. Her femininity had become more manifest, her physique more seductive. She had grown bigger, her skin slightly fairer, richer and more resplendent, and she seemed taller in her brown high heeled shoes. There was a captivating new air of verve and elegance about her, a fresh, enticing and consuming attractiveness, a novel and powerful magnetism. Yet I felt nothing but curiosity as she stood framed in the doorway.

‘Please come in and sit down’ I told her, waving her into the chair opposite the bed where I was sitting. She stepped in, her legs looking soft and lovely as she lowered herself into the seat facing me with conscious grace.

‘What would you like to drink?’ I offered.

‘Nothing’ she replied.

I waved away the guard and my eyes returned to Divine. ‘How have you been?’ I inquired.

‘So, so’ she replied.

I immediately went into the heart of the matter, ‘Tell me about this issue of your escape from me. You say it was your older sister that instigated it, right?’

‘Yes, my older sister, Doric.’ She looked away from my hardened stare to the window from which shafts of sunlight were flowing into the room. ‘Doric said you are too old for me, that at your age you are likely to be married with kids and that you probably left your wife and kids back in your country to come here to enjoy a young blood temporarily and that you would abandon me after using me, when you eventually leave our country and our men who would have known about both of us would not want me for serious relationship or marriage. She asked me how I know that you are not married and you don’t have kids back in your country and I could only say that you told me so and she laughed at me and called me a naïve young fool. She said that my affair with you was unfair to me and exploitative of my youth, that real love cannot exist across different generations, that your sole intention is to exploit me sexually and take undue advantage of a young girl, that just because I am needy at the moment and you have the money to solve my problems doesn’t make it right for you to take sexual advantage of me.’

I was bowled over but fighting a forming frown. ‘Really? Divine you are nineteen years old. You are not a kid. You are legally an adult capable of taking your own decisions’

‘I live in her house. She feeds me!’ Her voice rose to a piercing pitch, one that I had never heard before.

‘But I waited for you through the years without laying a finger on you. If my intentions were carnally exploitative would I have waited that long?  And your sister waited for me to finish paying all your school bills and for you to graduate from college before coming up with this awful, false and selfish verdict, and how quickly you believed her! So quickly, because it was convenient for you to believe her at that point after your desperate needs had been met by me. All the time we spent together, all the dreams we shared no longer meant anything. Just a few seemingly intelligent words from Big Sister…….and everything we built crumbles in an instant, becomes rubble, blown off by the wind of distrust and disappears into thin air. A strange concept of love, isn’t it?’

‘I didn’t have a choice. I live under her roof’ she siren-ed up to a crescendo and started crying, her body trembling as the tears streamed down her face, unto her quaking, bursting breasts.

‘All the hugs, all the kisses, all the promises, long nights together and my long trips on that lonely, winding, dangerous road to your school, how could I have imagined that just a few discouraging words from another girl that happens to have been born by your mother can send all our past, present and future dreams into the pit of hell in one damned second, and that is love by your definition?’

Her cries accelerated spasmodically, but I felt no sympathy for her, only loathing. ‘I am trying to understand the sort of family you come from in which one of the siblings can just wake up and mindlessly terminate another member’s vibrant relationship in which there has never been one single argument, and shut her away and shut her up from communicating with the man she loves, and quite frankly I do not believe you. I am not saying your sister, who by the way has never set eyes on me is crazy about me, but…….’

‘She knows you. She sees you on TV, she watches your movies and musicals like everybody else, what do you think? Everyone knows you for crying out loud and that’s part of the problem. Like everybody else she read about that embarrassing sex scandal involving you and Fina, a lady who is rumoured to be carrying the deadly acquired immuno deficiency syndrome, naturally Doric does not want her kid sister  to be involved with such a man.’ Her lips firmed around the corners.

We regarded each other stonily, neither of us speaking. I could hear only her labored breathing. I rose to my feet and paced involuntarily about the room. ‘So if I am so unsettling, so dreadful and so dangerous because I am the one who brought HIV and AIDS to Uganda, spread it around and caused an interminable epidemic that killed over a million and a half human beings, why have you been struggling to come back to me? Why are you back?’

Stiff silence greeted me and I charged. ‘You are back to pick me up from where you left me, like a sack of potatoes, but human beings aren’t objects that you can dump and retrieve as you please. Some of us aren’t stonehearted; some of us have feelings in our hearts and blood running in our veins and a conscience. We are human and the things you do to a person can destroy him emotionally, mentally, even physically. Do you know the pains you caused me in these horrid months? Do you have an idea what I have been through, where I’ve been to, the places I’ve entered, the people I’ve seen, the things I’ve experienced…. the  travails, the perils  I have undergone on account of your action?’

‘What are they?’ She demanded, stopping crying.

‘Do you know how I survived? Do you know why I am alive?’ My voice trailed, the words rolling out without my mind’s control.

‘What have you been through? Tell me’ she demanded soberly.

‘Do you care?’ I lashed with a rising voice.

‘I do!’ She snapped tremulously.

‘If you cared for me you wouldn’t have done what you did to me, even if your good old mother commanded it.’ My head shook with irritation. ‘Now you are back because I am still breathing, because I am still standing, and you think am a cheap object you can throw away in the dustbin and pick up when you want and I will always be there waiting and willing and available for your pleasure no matter what you do and where you go? Who told you that I am cheap? Go back to that person and tell her that I am not cheap, that I am not for pick and dump. Get up and get out of my life. Disappear forever, don’t look back and never come back. I never want to set my eyes on you again!’

She rose with a gratuitous movement as though in a trance, her lips quaking wordlessly and the tears rolling off her eyes and face. She stood in front of me, looking into my furious eyes and then I saw through her fragile weakness, her incapacitation, and when she thrust her body on me, my brain ordered my hands to push her away but my hands disobeyed the order. My mind lost control of my body and I became zomboid. My hands pulled her mechanically and held her tight and there she was, trembling in my embrace, bathing me with her tears and sweat. Our lips found each other, her salivary mouth salty and desperate for mine. My hands probed her back as I kissed away her tears and sucked her lips until my lips ached. My eager fingers finally found the zipper behind her neck and pulled at it, taking down her dress. She climbed out of the clothing and stood in her matching brown knickers and brassier. She was still the most beautiful spectacle my eyes had ever witnessed. I put my arms around her and unfastened her brassier. Robust breasts showed up, large and firm like overripe oversized oranges. She took off my shirt and unbuckled my belt. I pulled off my shirt and shoes and kicked off my trousers.  The urgency of my desire for her was such that there was no room for foreplay. As soon as she flashed the green light caution belonged to the dog as I rowed into her river which was flooded, intent on showing the neophyte the ropes, I penetrated instantly, undeterred and swift, throbbing and pushing in and out as we gasped and whimpered and writhed with pleasure at different levels of ecstasy, her grip on my back intensified to a veritable frenzy, her nails scratching and tearing my flesh as our perspiration flowed, mingling in pleasant unity. Astoundingly she needed no coaching in the game, she was an astute adept.  Her wide hips lifted me gently, bringing me down, her long legs extending and distending, intensifying the pleasure of our physical union into one entity. Then together we came into a shattering explosion of passion and desire. It was not until it was over that I realized that I had not used a condom, and that another man, or perhaps several other men had been there before me, for the hole that the tip of my smallest finger had found impenetrable, was now almost too wide for my average-sized manhood. Then I noticed that the room was oozing with a putrid odor like the nauseating stench of rotten flesh, my nostrils filled with the pungent reek of decay. I looked down at the ghoulish spectacle that I had waited two long costly years for and shuddered, for whitish puss-like discharge swam around the lips of her regenerative apparatus, which now looked ugly and alive, as though infested by a brood of maggots.

‘Who did it?’ I demanded in a desiccated voice, with a withering look, alarm flaring within my heart as we lay spent on the bed.

‘Did what?’ She inquired in obviously feigned oblivion of the subject matter.

‘Who deflowered you?’ The question sprung out in near whisper, my voice cold, heavy and intent.

A flash of presentiment scrawled across her face as she cleared her throat timorously.  ‘I knew you would ask. I did it myself with my fingers.’ She butted in meekly and stared at the floor, averting my gaze but unable to cover the iced secrecy on her face. I was distraught. My face fell, my normal confident demeanor vanished instantly, and I knew forever, as steely stillness befell the room.

I swallowed hard, I had heard many lies in my life especially since I came to this amazing  country where people lied like children; routinely recounting the most unimaginative and unbelievable falsehoods. But this was by far the most obvious lie I had ever been told, a rattling story that held as much water as a basket. ‘There are still a few things you need to know about men.’ I broke the silence quite softly, ‘one of them is that when a man makes love to a woman, his blood pumps fast and all his senses function at their optimum. He perceives, feels her, reads her like a book and subconsciously analyses her. He can tell if she is a novice or an expert in the act. The rhythm of your body, the expertise in your reaction in bed shows that you are no longer a beginner and that for you sex is not an act but an art. Therefore save those lies for someone else. If you have to be with me it must be in truth, not in deceit. I can’t handle that anymore. Who broke your virginity?’

Divine sat up and faced the center table, guilt distending within her, a plausible explanation seeping out of her. ‘He is a guy called Buddy, an O.B, old boy, of my school who works as a salesman for Samsung in Bombo Road. He was my senior, two years ahead of me, but we were not close in school. It happened that we ran into each other after I left school and it just happened.’

The disclosure stung me like a deadly mamba, spreading its villainous poison immeasurably into my veins, through my body, up to my head, my palate tart as quinine, my feelings fluctuating from impotent resentment to pure unadulterated hatred. I hated her for the heinous betrayal and her impetus in lasciviously divulging the details, even though I had demanded for them. It irked me profoundly that my years of dutiful support had counted very little to her in taking that vital decision of her life and that she had chosen someone else despite my costly sacrifice. My first impulse was to strangle her, pack her body in the boot of my car and drive behind the hotel and dump it in Lake Victoria. But instead I inquired delicately, ‘Why did it happen, were you in love with him?’

‘No, but I was tired of being a virgin’ she explained awkwardly.

‘But you didn’t consider coming for the man you made to wait for two years while he labored to pay your bills, the one you promised to give your love, virginity and even your hand in marriage?’ I prodded additionally as spasms of sickening jealousy ran through my being, overpowering me, filling me with resentment, almost strangulating me. ‘How long after you met with this…..Buddy….’ I spat out his name contemptuously, ‘did it take you to get into bed with him?’

‘Six days’ she mumbled. Her tears resumed dripping as internalized whimpers racked her cute feminine frame.

‘Six days?’ I was shocked. ‘Is he stupendously rich or some kind of superstar genius, inventive trailblazer, academic wizard, charismatic political leader, scientific or artistic whiz kid?’

‘Nothing of that sort’ she mumbled.

‘Just a normal guy, so why did you give him what you promised me, which I waited two years for and sacrificed so much of my time, emotions, energy and money for, in six days, did he pay you for it? Did you sell it to him?’ I was dazed with astonishment.

‘Pay me? Sell it? He has no money; he earns peanuts selling phones for a Samsung agent. Please honey, try to understand.’ She stretched out her hands and tried to reach for me but I shoved them off and dragged myself up from the bed, my body shaking with unprecedented mortification. I had never been cheated by a lover in this way before. I had always been sufficient and satisfactory to the girls I had chosen and I had never selected any woman here because of my numerous fears. Divine was the only one I trusted. I had lifted her from the garbage dump of the coal monger, propelled her up the social scale and opened her eyes and now she deemed me unworthy of her, having seen from her new position other men whom she felt were superior to me by whatever yardstick her foolish head measured masculine superiority and she had mindlessly kicked me in the face for the freedom to be with them. The fact that after all we shared she had offered me up as a sacrifice to gain the respect of her bullish older sister and the love of a penniless anonymous neophyte was simply indigestible.

  Divine had let me down in such an ignoble, uncaring and cruel manner, despite my infinite generosity, in spite of my best efforts and intentions for her.  My temper unraveled, growing into an untold fury as the unwelcome information about her unpardonable conduct stored irremovably in my shocked mind and was permanently engraved in my outraged memory. I distasted her and loathed Buddy, whoever he was, and longed to get my hands around his throat or better still his groin. I hated her schoolboys, all of them, old and new, the seemingly innocent but despicable OBs who were after one thing. I wished for death to rescue me from my shame, but my death wish was not granted. When I spoke again I was an inconsolable victim of unashamed tear ducts. ‘I gave you my love, my care, my time. I gave you my money, all that you needed, all that I had. I risked my life frequently on the road and even in the air to see that you were alright. You were the only thing I really cared for. I gave you all that you needed. I waited for you every day for two whole agonizing years. Do you know how it feels to wait for a person for two years, footing her bills, subsidizing her education, paying for her daily maintenance, on a promise that she would be yours? Then she comes out of school and presto, she abandons you and off she goes with another guy, after barely relating with him for six days, straight into bed to offer him her virginity that you had been waiting for all this time, on a platter of gold. Not even a man of your inkling but some immature kid barely out of high school, eking out a living selling phones for some wretched Indian corner shop and earning a miserable forty dollars a month. That’s what I spend to give you a single meal! Less than half what I pay each of my security guards monthly. You should have at least asked me to lend you my gate man, at least he is richer!’

‘It’s not about money!’ Divine sniggered, frowning, her lips twitching repeatedly.

I jerked an accusing finger at her, my mind full of earthquakes and tsunamis as I rammed in furiously. ‘Then she comes back telling you cock and bull stories about her omnipotent and omnipresent big sister who has never set eyes on you before, hating you enough to ban her from seeing you and she being subservient enough to a bloody older sister that is just another girl like her, only a few years older, not to even sneakily call you on the phone, not to even send you a covert text message to know if you are alive or dead after all your sacrifice to see her through school. Was it your all powerful sister then that ordered you to open your legs for the wretched OB? Was Big Sister the one that deflowered you? My dear, you must think I am really daft, a veritable vegetable, an impotent imbecile. You ought to know that I am not the first fool you ever met in the street. I was a university lecturer in Europe before I came to this your bush country of yours, lost in the middle of nowhere! You should have slept with my bloody security guard. He earns more than double the miserable bum you chose over me!’ I screamed dementedly, wanting to get as physically distant from her as possible.

‘It’s not about money…….’ she repeated sulkily, her voice quavering, the words stillborn, hung in the air.

I fixed my eyes on her, my furious glare shooting at her like a police searchlight, contempt dripping from my mouth as I vocalized. ‘It’s not about money, I know. It is about love and respect and care and compassion and conscience. Feelings you do not have in my regard. Is that why you made me unleash large amounts of cash money on your tuition? Now you want to dismiss my hard-earned money with a wave of the hand because it has finished paying for your education and you have finally graduated and left school and  can now afford the luxury of independent choice, of being infatuated by a penniless, incapable, shop assistant who cannot even afford to buy you a decent meal.’ I grunted angrily, my jaw set with irritation as I proceeded. ‘A mere boy who cannot even treat himself of gonorrhea or syphilis or herpes simplex or whatever filthy bacteria he has given you that makes your womb smell like a rotten corpse, which you must have just passed to me a moment ago! How can it be about money now? I have solved your monetary problems and elevated you to a pedestal where money is no longer your primary concern, and my reserved, innocent virgin has turned into a cheap, willing whore, offering herself to the first stranger that comes along, for free, because it’s not about money! What is it about? Tell me! Is it about dick? You think some skinny, hungry green banana-eating, watery soup-drinking, bush boy has more sex appeal and physical stamina than me?’

‘Please stop’ she pleaded with a compassionate gesture, weathering the storm of my urgent wrath with astounding fortitude.

 ‘Why did you do it?’ I demanded with a sinking sensation in my stomach.

She groveled in a sore tone and it rose to air-splitting screams. ‘I told you, my sister prohibited me from seeing you, saying that you are too old for me…..that I need a boy from my age group,  so I met Buddy and he is handsome….’

‘Handsome?’ Glowering, my fury re-surged like a tidal wave. No reason could have been more ludicrous, more demeaning and more insulting to my persona. I involuntarily held up a hand, took a deep breath and whispered in a strangled voice. ‘Handsome?’ I was stupefied beyond reason and my anger burbled over. She regarded me blankly and anguish overtook my fury, my eyes liquid with unbearable sorrow.

I had always consciously overlooked my gift of esthetics as one of the ebullient attributes of my perpetual youthful and extroverted personality, but at the risk of immodest narcissism and self-panegyric, if there was anything I was certain about myself, it was the indisputable fact that I was not just a handsome man but a very handsome man, and I had been good looking all my life.  My school friends gossiped endlessly about my good looks in primary school and young girls whispered it bashfully when I was in secondary school. My mother’s friends wished openly that they had sons with my kind of allure. Girls fought over me at university, feminine hordes threatening to kill themselves just to be with me. Several white women had fallen over themselves at my feet in racist South Europe, and in many African nations Deejays broadcasted my charm as they aired my music; TV presenters advertised my attractiveness, entertainment writers turned my superb physical attributes into legend and in my last concert more young women fainted than had ever collapsed before Michael Jackson in a single show, with health workers struggling to carry away limp bodies. 

Even though I was in my middle-age, I was still stronger and better physically endowed than many  men half my age, and my appeal was now backed up with good clothing of the highest international quality and much of the paraphernalia of style that good money could buy. Hardly did any young woman here walk past me without throwing an inviting smile or straining her neck to take a second glance. I could not remember any occasion in my life in which anyone had been said to be superbly handsome with a view to eliciting my envy. I was always sure of my comparative advantage. But here I was, and another man's aesthetic superiority over me was being scornfully shoved down my throat. From her face I could see that Divine truly believed in the supremacy of this new boy on the block and that was why she had converted two years of my life coupled with heavy financial investment into six days of his with empty hands.  Life was indeed unfair. She had dropped a bomb on my psyche and I felt a lifetime of self-confidence blown to bits. Could I ever be able to pick up the pieces and be the confident aloof man I used to be?

She must have guessed the flow of my thought as I shifted from foot to foot in the room, zombielike, struggling to master my enragement, for she cut in. ‘He is half your age,’ as if that would make me feel better. In a certain sublime manner it did, slightly, but it did not redeem my diminished self-esteem. I began to harbor misgivings about my outlook. I knew that age was no longer my strong point in this context but I had always been aware that I could still hold my own and that most intelligent women, irrespective of age, preferred mature, responsible and caring men. Nevertheless, a nagging feeling was developing within me. The fear, the horror actually, that my age had started eroding my handsome and youthful physique and gradually dismantling my visage, and that the inevitable transformation from youth to old age had begun. I had always taken my physical appearance as a given and never bothered to go to gym, do strenuous sports or anything to improve my looks. My childhood friend Tim, my oldest friend, residing in London, used to tell me each time I went to his house on summer holidays, to do something to maintain my looks, that we were getting older every day. He spent much of his time in the gym, drowned himself in creams and perfume, and garbed himself like a fashion model or a movie star. It paid off in the number of his juvenile girlfriends. I had never used a cream in my whole life and I had never been inside a gym. For the first time I wished I had taken Tim’s advice. If my girl could jump into bed with a near-stranger because he was young and handsome then something was seriously wrong with me or perhaps with her, but surely with our affinity. This complex ate into the very root of my self-confidence, making me deeply insecure.

I started dressing up, riven by angst and battered by Divine’s confessed betrayal, her sobbing providing background sound for the stony quiet room. When I was done dressing, I left the room amid her hysterical cries. I tried to regain my earlier composure but I knew that it was gone forever and I would never be the boisterous youth I used to be. My self-confidence had been annihilated by one fell swoop of disloyalty, turning me into a sickly, wrinkly, dejected old man in desperate need of a walking stick and an old peoples’ home. I tramped half-conscious to my vehicle and drove uneasily away.

 BOB EJIKE

If you want to read the entire book please request via email to the author. profbobejike@yahoo.com